VALLEY CENTER  Long before the huge pumpkins that Bates Nut Farm in Valley Center is known for have matured, and long before children swarm over the brilliant-orange fields, the business of growing the gourds takes up much of the summer.

The fields today are green and most of the pumpkins are just small bulbs at the base of thousands of flowers recently pollinated by bees. In a few months the pumpkins will be giant — weighing 80 to 180 pounds — and sold off quickly at the farm off Woods Valley Road that for many in the county is an annual October destination.

“People take all the big ones right away. The first two weekends, that’s when all the big ones go,” said Victor Paz, the master pumpkin grower at the farm.

“I think people get caught up in the whole thing,” owner Sherrie Bates-Ness said. “It’s all about the experience.”

For more than 70 years, the Bates Nut Farm has sold pumpkins in October to customers who eschew the convenience of urban, makeshift pumpkin lots or the bins at local supermarkets in favor of a daylong pumpkin experience in the backcountry. Customers descend on the farm during the weeks leading up to Halloween and push wheelbarrows provided by the business through the fields, looking for the gourd that most captures their fancy.

Bates-Ness is a fourth-generation pumpkin grower and seller.

“My great-grandfather came here in 1921 and planted walnut trees,” she said. He and his family also cultivated other crops, including pumpkins, and eventually started a tradition of bringing inner-city kids to the grounds to experience farming.

“They would let them pick their own pumpkins, so we just started growing more and more of them — and people just kept coming out,” Bates-Ness said. It’s gone wacko crazy.”

She said the Bates’ farming lineage is special — not just for her but also for the visitors.

“We’re easily on our third generation of families that come out here to the farm,” she said. “We’re seeing kids of kids of kids that we saw years ago.”

Bates-Ness graduated with a business degree from San Diego State University and went to work in industry for a couple of years, but the farm drew her back. “I have a real passion for the whole thing,” she said.

Her husband, Tom Ness, worked for her father, Walter, and has been his right-hand man ever since. The couple are finalizing the purchase of the farm from him, Bates-Ness said.

Pumpkins are big business here. Aside from the 15 acres of giant pumpkins that the Bates staff manages, it also trucks in up to 1 million pounds of regular-sized pumpkins from Modesto.

Pumpkins also are a labor of love here.

Paz, 53, has worked at the Bates farm since he was a teenager. He has been planting, caring for and harvesting pumpkins most of his life.

It takes about four months for a giant pumpkin to grow from a seed to maturity. Smaller pumpkins (standard ones weighing between eight and 12 pounds) take only 60 to 90 days.

The crew starts preparing the fields in May and plants sometime between the 1st and the 4th of June each year. The biggest threat to the crop isn’t weather or disease, Paz said, but crows.

“When the seeds are first germinating, the crows come. They’ll go from row to row just pulling them out of the ground,” he said. Paz and other employees spend a lot of time in June shooing away the birds or creating scarecrows to ward them off.

When the pumpkins are fully grown, the crows often come back “and start pecking on the tops,” Bates-Ness said.

Another threat to pumpkins is heavy precipitation. Last year in late September, an inch of rain fell in a short time on the farm. The workers had to regularly rotate the pumpkins so the part resting on the ground wouldn’t become mushy. When a pumpkin weighs more than 100 pounds, and there are thousands of them, rotating can be a time-consuming task.